


Five Ways to Say ‘I Love You’

by grim_lupine



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-27
Updated: 2010-05-27
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grim_lupine/pseuds/grim_lupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Actions speak louder than words; sometimes words mean more than what’s on the surface; and sometimes, just sometimes, the right words themselves are needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways to Say ‘I Love You’

-

\--

 _keep the magic alive_

Nate comes home a little tired, kind of drained. There’s a dull sort of thumping behind his eyes. He opens the fridge for a beer, and thinks about just sticking his head inside and leaving it there for ten minutes or so.

When he shuts the door, Ray’s standing there in a pair of jeans with the top button undone (no underwear, Nate dimly notes) and a t-shirt that looks like a rainbow threw up all over it. Nate eyes it askance, then looks up at Ray, whose face is innocent but whose lips are twitching a little.

Ray’s not exactly fashion-savvy, but he knows what works for him (or rather, he knows what works for _Nate_ and what will therefore get him laid). Jeans and no underwear’s a standard. The shirt’s usually optional too. Sometimes he wanders around the house in sweatpants and one of Nate’s long-sleeved shirts, too long in the arms, and Nate rolls his eyes at himself but, well, it usually ends with Nate on his knees and Ray’s cock in his mouth; and when Nate pulls away from Ray’s spent cock, he makes him leave the shirt on. The point is, Ray never dresses like this unless he’s trying to fuck with Nate, like a three-year-old scribbling all over the walls of the house in crayon.

Nate pops the top off his beer. Pauses, then says dryly, “You look like you got into a hit-and-run with the primary color wheel.” He takes a swig from the bottle and watches Ray’s face dissolve into exaggerated indignation, and can’t keep the grin off his own face.

“Wow, I feel really loved,” Ray says, pouting. “Here I am, waiting for you to come home like a good little housewife and the first thing you do is mock me? I guess I’ll go change into something more _appropriate_.” He turns around and throws a sly look over his shoulder, and yeah, an invitation doesn’t really get more blatant than that.

Nate sets his beer down. Slides his fingers into Ray’s belt-loop and tugs him in close, turning him around as he does so that Ray ends up pressed up against Nate. The counter’s digging into the base of Nate’s back, but he doesn’t really care. His headache’s gone.

Ray very helpfully raises his arms so that Nate can strip the offending shirt off of him and throw it on the floor (he’ll most likely be burning it later). “Or, naked works too,” Ray says with a laugh in his voice, and tips his head up to kiss Nate square on the mouth.

“Naked works too,” Nate agrees, and proceeds to make that happen.

*

 _when he doesn’t need words to know you_

Nate brushes his teeth and studies himself in the mirror. Ray teases him about looking like a jailbait hooker, and laughed himself nearly sick the last time they went to a bar and Nate got carded, and the waitress choked when she saw his id, but Nate can see the onset of laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. They’re faint, but there. Nate doesn’t mind them, though; it’s strange, but he’s been looking at himself in this mirror every night for a while now, but he never really realized that this is what his face looks like when he’s just—happy.

“You’ve been in there for like an hour,” Ray calls from inside the bedroom. “Hey—are you jerking off in there? No fair, you know that’s like cheating, right? Yeah, if you jerk off when I’m not there, you’re cheating on me with yourself.”

Nate shuts his eyes, laughing silently. He bends down and spits toothpaste in the sink, rinses, washes it down the drain. There’s a huge glob of paste on the counter, a few inches from the sink, just congealing there where Ray must have dropped it. Nate’s told him again and again that if he can’t brush his teeth like a grownup, he needs to wipe it up when he drips or it’ll just dry there and wait for Nate to clean it up on the weekends. Nate eyes it, then sighs and wipes it up with a square of toilet paper. He’d mention it to Ray again, except, sometimes when he talks, he can start to hear echoes of his mother in his voice, and frankly it scares him a little.

Nate wipes his mouth on his sleeve and flips the light switch off. Ray’s sitting up in bed watching reruns of _The West Wing_ ; he says it’s because CJ Cregg is hot, and President Bartlet is a BAMF, but Nate knows he’s got a little bit of a crush on Sam Seaborn. (Absurdly young in the face, verbose, idealistic—Ray might have a bit of a type, and Nate’s all right with that.)

Ray takes one look at Nate and smirks, says, “You cleaned up after me, didn’t you?” He laughs when Nate rolls his eyes, and continues, “Seriously, don’t be such a pushover, Nate, just tell me to wipe it up.”

“I _do_ , and you don’t listen, and then I have to repeat myself and then I start sounding like my mom,” Nate grumbles.

“I know, it’s hilarious,” Ray says, still grinning. Nate slides under the covers and pushes his pillow closer to Ray’s.

“Glad I can afford you amusement,” Nate says, shaking his head and tugging the sheets up to his chin. Onscreen, Josh is standing outside Sam’s window, dripping wet and pointing to his own face. Ray reaches out and pretends to straighten Nate’s pillow, then leaves his arm there, fingers tangling lightly in Nate’s hair. Nate hides his grin against Ray’s side; Ray always does that yawn-stretch arm move that he’s probably been using since he was thirteen, like he thinks if he just holds Nate in bed instead of sucking him off, Nate will suddenly think it’s too gay or something. “Is this the episode with—” Nate starts, before his voice cracks into a yawn.

“All the flashbacks? Yeah,” Ray says, eyes fixed on the screen. “It’s really cool the way they show how everyone got hired, and—” he breaks off, flushing a little as he notices the smile quirking Nate’s lips. “CJ falls into a pool and gets wet, it’s really hot,” Ray finishes defensively.

Nate laughs a little and tucks his face back into Ray’s side, eyes already falling closed. “Just shut up and watch your show,” he murmurs, and falls asleep with Ray’s fingers running through his hair.

*

 _the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach_

When Nate cooks something—well. It’s not that it turns out _bad_ ; he’s too anal-retentive for that, follows the recipe carefully, does exactly as it says. It tastes good. It tastes fine.

When _Ray_ cooks, though, it isn’t _fine_ ; it turns out _amazing_. Nate doesn’t really get it—Ray opens up a recipe book the first time he tries a dish, and then proceeds to cheerfully ignore about 70% of what’s written there, making up his own rules as he goes. He substitutes ingredients, throws chili powder into things Nate’s pretty sure shouldn’t have chili powder in them; he buys strange vegetables Nate’s never seen and chops them up expertly (Nate could watch his hands deftly slice things in the kitchen for hours), and Nate’s pretty sure he’s going to put on enough weight for two people the way Ray keeps feeding him.

“Taste this,” becomes a familiar command; sometimes from a spoon, sometimes directly from Ray’s fingers, and Nate makes sure to suck on the tips of them when he’s done to see the way Ray grins at him happily. It’s always delicious, and Nate doesn’t really get it but he isn’t really surprised. Ray always does things his own way and it always works out, so this isn’t really any different.

This week it’s just soup, and yeah, soup sounds easy but Ray makes it so good that Nate gulps down two bowlfuls before it’s even had time to cool properly, and goes back for a third when he’s done. He doesn’t know half of what’s in there—crushed tomatoes, he saw, some cilantro, then Ray did some mysterious rummaging in the spice cupboard that he wouldn’t let Nate watch—but it’s _delicious_.

“O-kaaaay,” Nate says, drawing the word out as he licks his spoon clean, “you’re definitely cooking the next time my mom comes to visit.”

“Oh yeah?” Ray says, looking kind of pleased and masking it with a smirk.

“Yeah,” Nate says, getting up to put his bowl in the sink. He turns to grin at Ray and continues, “We need to show her there’s _some_ reason I’m keeping you around.” He flicks his eyes down Ray’s body and back up, and says slyly, “Well, besides the obvious.”

“Fuck you,” Ray says mock-indignantly, laughter glimmering in his eyes. “Your mom loves me, and you know it.”

He’s got a towel tied around his waist as a makeshift apron and soup smeared at the corner of his mouth. He looks stupid and mischievous and kind of like a kid who has plans to set something on fire, and Nate will never get over the way his dimples pop out when he grins. Nate looks at him and feels his chest clench sharply, suddenly, and leans in and licks his mouth clean until he can taste Ray under the tomato.

Nate pulls away and watches Ray open his eyes. “Yeah,” he says softly, meaning a thousand things that he’d have to learn ten different languages to put into words, “yeah, she does.”

His mom really does. It helps that Ray is unfailingly courteous and polite around her, even after all this time, but Nate knows that all his mom has ever wanted is for Nate to be _happy_ ; and with a mother’s unerring eye, she can see that he is. He really is.

*

 _even forever wouldn’t be long enough to stop wanting this_

“You’ll visit soon, yeah?” Nate says, holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he folds Ray’s million-and-one t-shirts. It’s phrased as a request but it comes out sounding like an order; Nate’s found that Brad responds exceptionally well to that tone of voice. Brad starts making some excuses, but Nate runs right over him and says mildly, “Or I could just tell your mother that I’m worried about you and how little you look like you’ve been eating, and you can go over there and let _her_ feed you up instead of Ray. You might find more beer and less fussing over here, though. Just saying.”

There’s a pause. “You’d rat on me to my own mother? That’s a low blow, sir.” There’s a laugh in Brad’s voice. “I guess I’ll have to visit, then, if only to re-witness the spectacle of Ray Person actually living like an adult. Every time I leave I think I must have been imagining things; I was half-expecting him to fill the house with strippers and pot.”

Nate tucks the phone more firmly into his shoulder. Ray can never resist eavesdropping on Nate’s conversations from the other phone; he probably thinks he’s being stealthy, but Nate can hear him breathing, a sound as familiar to him as his own name. “Ray, an adult?” Nate asks, injecting all the incredulity he can into his voice. “You must have hit your head every time you visited, Brad. Anyway, there’s just the one stripper, you must have missed her. She lives in the front closet with the pot.”

Brad chuckles, then raises his voice slightly. “Person, you’re a bad influence. The LT used to be all innocent and shit before he got with you.”

“Pure as a field of freshly-driven snow,” Nate agrees over the sound of Ray squawking indignantly. He can hear the clanging of pots and pans through the line, with a secondary echo from downstairs; Ray’s banging around in the kitchen, and Nate’s upstairs making faces at the way Ray keeps t-shirts even when they have holes at the seams that Nate can stick three fingers through. It’s all obscenely domestic, but if Nate can’t help just grinning a little helplessly at his _life_ , well, there’s no one there to see him.

“The two of you are assholes enough to me on your _own_ ,” Ray says crossly. “Quit ganging up on me.”

“Well, you know what they say about eavesdroppers, Ray,” Brad says smugly, and then the two of them are off, cheerfully insulting each other and clearly loving every minute of it. Nate just listens to them go at it for a while, a comfortable soundtrack to his laundry escapades.

“—Yeah, you _better_ come visit, Brad,” Ray says, “hey! We can go to a strip club, you wanna go to a strip club? Nate never lets me go, but the two of us outnumber him.”

“Oh, you can go to a strip club if you’d like, Ray,” Nate says comfortably. “I’ll have the _couch_ all made up for you when you come back.” Ray laughs in his ear, and Nate grins to himself.

“You’re totally the wife, you know that?” Ray says, voice kind of muffled. Nate knows he’s eating the cookies they’re saving for dessert. “Seriously, Brad, I already know what he’s going to be like at sixty, all nag nag nag, ‘Ray, no chewing with your mouth open; Ray, don’t swear in front of the neighbors; Ray, I have a headache tonight.’” He stops, then says worriedly, “Nate, you know if you stop putting out for me, that’s totally grounds to dump you, right?”

And it’s a joke, but—the way he talks so _comfortably_ about them together at sixty—Nate shakes his head at himself. No need to prove Ray right by being a _total_ girl about this.

Brad’s laughing quietly at the both of them, like they’re so ridiculous he can’t help it. “Sir, if you ever end up coming to your senses and dispose of Ray’s body in the backyard, just call me up and I’ll be your alibi.”

“Oh, nice loyalty to your best friend, dude!” Ray says indignantly.

“Why, is he there?” Brad says innocently.

“I’m totally hanging up on you now,” Ray informs him.

“I’ll believe it when I hear it,” Brad tells him, and Nate gives in and just cracks up, putting a hand over his face and laughing into his palm. “Right,” Brad says decisively, “this is all very disgustingly domestic, so _I’m_ hanging up now, before I spontaneously grow a vagina.”

“Take care, Brad,” Nate says firmly before Ray can make whatever obscene comment is on the tip of his tongue. Brad hangs up, then Nate does, and then calls out, “Ray! Stop eating those cookies.”

There’s a pause, and then: “Stop reading my mind, it’s creepy!” Ray calls back; except Nate isn’t reading his mind, he just _knows_ Ray, like Ray knows him, and Nate isn’t quite sure how the two of them got to this point but he knows he wouldn’t give it up for the world.

*

 _hey, sometimes you have to just man up and say it_

“—and fuck, it’s like, I know Brad, right? I mean, he’s like Iceman or whatever on the outside but he’s just gooey on the inside, like a marshmallow, except he can fuck you up in eleven different ways or whatever. So I know that _clearly_ I’m his best friend in the whole world and he’d cry himself to sleep every night if he didn’t have me in his life, and it’s just lucky for him that I know that, ‘cause otherwise I might actually take him seriously when he calls me the bane of his existence or whatever he said to me last time I talked to him,” Ray rants, sitting on the couch with his legs kicked up on the coffee table in front of him and Nate’s head in his lap. Nate murmurs in agreement, not really listening but letting Ray’s words seep into his brain slowly. He has a feeling that if he were to tell anyone that the most comfortable evening he can think of is exactly this, reading _The Mysterious Affair at Styles_ with Ray’s fingers in his hair and his endless diatribe as background noise, they would write it off as insanity due to prolonged exposure. Or maybe a form of Stockholm Syndrome, but the fact is that it’s _true_.

“Are you even listening to me?” Ray asks, sounding like he’s trying for indignant but he’s too relaxed to get even halfway there.

“Ray, you know I take in every word you speak like it’s a mandate from God,” Nate says absently, not taking his eyes away from his book. He jolts when Ray pulls his hair sharply, and glares up at him.

“Don’t give me that look, you love it when I do that,” Ray says easily. There are potato-chip crumbs all over his face. He looks ridiculous, and there is absolutely no reason for Nate’s heart to skip a beat, except that clearly it’s an inferior model for making him fall for Ray in the first place.“People still think you’re like this virginal saint or something, but I know the truth.”

“If you had any hope of getting laid tonight, shut up and let me read my book,” Nate tells him, and settles his head more firmly into Ray’s lap.

Ray, of course, does nothing of the sort, but Nate wasn’t exactly holding his breath waiting for it.

“I mean, just because I _may_ have called him like three times when he was in the middle of getting laid—”

“It was more like twelve,” Nate interjects.

“—whatever, and it’s not like he can’t just frown at a girl and have her drop down to suck his cock any time he wants, it’s _Brad_. I don’t know what he’s so pissed about; I’m his best friend, I’m supposed to come before his fuck of the week!”

“Oh, are you best friends again?” Nate asks innocently. “I thought he told you never to speak to him again on pain of exsanguination.”

There’s silence, and when Nate gives in and looks up at Ray, mouth twitching, he sees Ray giving him a look of acute betrayal, eyes huge and wounded.

“Wow, all I ask for is a little sympathy, and you can’t even give me that,” Ray says, shaking his head sadly. “I guess I see where I fall on your list of priorities, Nate.”

God, he is so ridiculous. He’s never going to grow up, not really, and Nate loves him like that. Brad tells Nate all the time that he’s probably certifiable for that, but then, Brad could write the book on being unwillingly charmed by Ray Person, so he really has no room to talk. Ray’s still complaining about Nate’s shortcomings as a listener/boyfriend/human being, clearly enamored with the sound of his own voice, and his fingers have not stopped running through Nate’s hair. Nate couldn’t curb his smile if someone put a gun to his head, and what really hits him is that that’s totally normal when he’s with Ray.

“I love you,” he interrupts, and watches Ray’s face crumble into a hilarious combination of uncertainty, outrage, and smug pleasure. He doesn’t say it much, but when he does, it’s 80% because he wants to, and 20% to watch Ray make that exact face. (All right, maybe it’s more like 60% and 40%, but it is a pretty amazing face.)

Ray narrows his eyes at Nate for minute. Nate doesn’t tell him that from down below, it makes him look more than a little constipated. “Okay, so in that case you should clearly call Brad up and defend my honor,” Ray says, and Nate just laughs at him and opens his book up again.

“Sorry, you’re on your own with that one,” he says comfortably, and that sets Ray off again. Nate almost manages to finish his book this time before Ray stops for air.

Later that night, Ray takes him to bed, strips him carefully and lays him facedown. He’s as voluble as ever, but Nate doesn’t hear most of what his mouth is saying; tonight, he pays attention to the unspoken language woven by Ray’s hands on his body, the soft touch at the small of his back and the brush of Ray’s lips over the back of Nate’s neck that say _this, forever_.

Ray slides into him as Nate pants for breath, and when Ray says, a little brokenly, “Jesus, jesus, _Nate_ ,” all Nate can hear ringing in his ears is _I love you too_.

\--

-


End file.
